How it all began: the personal account of a West German urban guerrilla - Bommi Baumann

A memoir of Bommi Baumann, a member of the 2 June Movement, one of West Germany's urban guerrilla groups in the 1960s and 70s. First published in 1975, after he renounced violence and left the group in 1972. Libcom.org does not agree with all the politics of the author but reproduces this text for reference.

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Others should understand why people take the road of armed struggle, how they come to it, how the seeds are planted, and what the emotions behind it are, what kind of considerations and psychic preconditions are needed to overcome the fear involved

a short, generally accurate biography of him up to his arrest in 1981 on Wikipedia, from the 80ies on, he always stayed a libertarian and non-dogmatic socialist, he admitted somewhere that his political thinking was more influenced by London, Kerouac and Ginsberg than by Marx or Bakunin (pirated editions of Bakunin's works were an important source of his group's finances and his personal income around 1970). Due to his health problems and drug consumption not able to work regularly, he lived for some time after 1990 from revenues he got from selling a restituted villa in East Germany which he had inherited from his grandmother and often dressed in public like a toff. He was up to his death regularly interviewed by the media on urban guerilla-related stuff, during the last 20 years, he increasingly stressed that he thought that secret services and "deep state"/gladio structures played a major, if not a leading role in the foundation process of the urban guerilla scene (e.g. via the agent provocateur Peter Urbach) in Germany

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